Magento Enterprise Edition 1.13: Learn why and how you should upgrade

Benefits and Best Practices for Upgrading to Magento Enterprise Edition 1.13

Magento Enterprise Edition 1.13 offers optimum performance and scalability, but, as with any software upgrade, there are many questions merchants have, such as “Do I really need to upgrade? What’s the benefit for me to do so?” and “What’s the best way to upgrade smoothly?” Get answers for these questions.

Key improvements we will experience with Magento 1.13 :

Optimized indexing

Re-indexing is now a background process unlike it used to be previously. Re-indexing operations will now have absolutely no impact on the customer’s shopping experience or even the administrative store activities. Magento’s new and optimized indexing process will allow you to frequently update products, categories, URL redirects without hampering the store’s performance. Also incremental indexing will reduce the need for full re-indexing and since most operations has been now made automated; it will save a significant IT management time, allowing merchants to focus more on revenue generation. The new optimizing indexing will allow full catalog re-indexing for 1 million products in just 4 minutes.

Improved Caching

Full page caching of Magento has been improved so that now it invalidates pages that are not affected by product or category changes. This will facilitate quicker loading of high volume pages.

The Caching system performance has also been enhanced to lower server load and thus will support larger traffic volumes while conducting back end operations. It has been optimized to deliver a consistent shopping experience.

Streamlined Checkout

Checkout performance of Magento has gone through an unprecedented improvement. A hugely reduced page load time will ensure 20-35% increase in overall flow speed of the customer checkout process. Faster checkout will significantly improve customers’ shopping experience which will help you achieve a higher conversion rate for your store.

Accurate Tax Calculations

A lot of tax calculation issues confronted in the previous editions have been fixed. The issues involving General Tax Notes, Rounding Errors, Fixed Product Tax (FPT), Discount Calculation has all been resolved. Magento Enterprise now supports more than 3000 tax rate zones. An additional support for Canadian tax requirements has also been introduced.

Functional Enhancements :

Improvements have been made in more than 350 areas including the web store and shopping cart, admin order creation, import and export functionality, web API components and payment methods.

These Magento Enterprise 1.13 Key Enhancements will surely drive Magento experience to a whole new level.